This publication provides an overview of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative in Iowa.
This brief summarizes the findings from an effort by Iowa state leaders to request support from the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs’ Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Pew Charitable Trusts to assess the impact of measures taken to address overcrowding and urgent health concerns due to COVID-19. The authors studied the effects public safety and CBC operations using a Justice Reinvestment Initiative approach. In March 2020, the Iowa Department of Corrections (IDOC) faced overcrowding and urgent health concerns. To address these issues, IDOC and other criminal justice agencies implemented measures to reduce the prison population and expand community-based corrections (CBC). These efforts included limiting revocations, expanding administrative review processes, releasing low-risk individuals, and increasing the use of telehealth and technology for supervision and programming. As a result, the prison population decreased by 13 percent within 6 months, while the CBC population increased by nearly 17 percent. Despite this increase, the average monthly revocation rate decreased by almost 40 percent between March 2020 and March 2021. IDOC and other criminal justice agencies took measures to exhaust community resources before recommending revocations from community-based corrections (CBC), expanding administrative processes for reviewing revocations, and releasing individuals who did not pose a risk to public safety from the state’s correctional facilities onto the state’s CBC caseload. Criminal justice stakeholders across the state also implemented changes at the local level that increased both the use of telehealth services delivered by community treatment providers and the use of technology to continue supervision contacts, deliver programming, and convene court hearings. In part, these reductions resulted from operational procedures that CBC agencies began implementing as part of a larger goal to safely reduce revocations and prioritize jail and prison space for people who posed a risk to public safety.